Translation, Ideology, and Social Practice

Translation can be used in a double ideologico-social sense: to orient people towards acceptance of a situation or to evidence the possibility of change. In One-Dimensional Man (1964), Marcuse analyses the results of a study on work in a firm in the USA, evidencing how complaints originally formulated as general statements concerning a common condition, were “translated” so as to reduce their generality. Thus construed the translation changes the meaning of the actual proposition. Before its “translation,” the worker’s statement makes a general accusation concerning people working in unfavorable conditions. In the translation the original proposition, a protest, is reconducted to the official order, favoring forms of “linguistic alienation”. Similar situations abound in social practice and translation today, in the “communication-production” order where language dulls critical awareness and responsibility. This chapter investigates the relationship between words and values, the ideological dimension of sense, and recourse to translation, whether intralingual, interlingual or intersemiotic, either to favor passive acceptance of the order of discourse, the condition of “linguistic alienation”, or to develop the capacity for interrogation and conscious awareness of a society that, like that described by Orwell, resorts to a sort of Newspeak to gain consensus and acceptance of the official order, the order of discourse.